A Grim Week of Executions and Racial Strife

A man kneeled in the street in Ferguson, Mo., last week during a protest over the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

Larry W. Smith / European Pressphoto Agency

August 22, 2014

Quick History

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

As new conflicts erupt around the globe, older ones often get pushed off the international radar. But that does not mean they have gone away: The Syrian war, for example, is still raging. Indeed, it “is metastasizing outwards in an uncontrollable process whose eventual limits we cannot predict,” said Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, in her last address before the Security Council. (Her term ends Aug. 30.)

She criticized the international community for its ineffectiveness in Syria and against other mass atrocities. “Conflict prevention is complex, but it can be achieved,” declared Ms. Pillay, a former judge in South Africa. “None of the crises erupted without warning. They built up over years — and sometimes decades — of human rights grievances.”

The contagion of the Syrian conflict was wrenchingly displayed in the murder of an American journalist, James Foley, who had been captured in Syria in November 2012 and was beheaded by a British-accented jihadi of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The killer warned that more American hostages would be similarly executed if the United States continued its airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.

After Mr. Foley’s slaying, Secretary of State John Kerry said ISIS must be confronted “wherever it tries to spread its despicable hatred” and “must be destroyed.” On Thursday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, declared that ISIS could not be defeated unless its bases in Syria were attacked. But the general gave no indication that such strikes were imminent.

Ms. Pillay’s dismay over the world’s failure to stop endless conflicts was also echoed in Gaza, where masked gunmen presumably linked to Hamas executed as many as 18 Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel. There have been many such executions before, but this wave followed Israeli airstrikes on Thursday that killed three senior Hamas commanders. The strikes would have required up-to-the-minute intelligence, and the public executions were most likely meant to warn informants.

The human rights commissioner’s argument that crises all have deep roots also applied, albeit differently, to the eruption of racial violence in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting of a black youth by a white policeman on Aug. 9. As the clashes subsided, polls and interviews confirmed the depth of the gap that persists in America between blacks and whites.

Syria Revisited

A year ago last Thursday, a sarin gas attack in the Ghouta region outside Damascus left hundreds dead and the world horrified. Although President Bashar al-Assad of Syria denied his forces were responsible, he subsequently agreed, after Russia’s prompting, to dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons, a process essentially completed last week.

Nonetheless, Syria’s civil war, pitting the government against a broad array of rebel forces — with ISIS the most ruthless of all — remains the deadliest of all the world’s conflicts. On Friday, the United Nations human rights office in Geneva reported that 191,369 people had been confirmed killed from March 2011, when the conflict erupted, to April 2014. The real toll was probably far higher; at least 2,000 of the victims were children under 9.

The day before, Ms. Pillay had berated the Security Council, saying greater responsiveness would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, citing Syria along with ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza.

The Arab Spring showed that revolutions do not necessarily lead to better government or to stability, and the Syrian civil war posed the terrifying possibility that the Assad dictatorship could be replaced with murderous ISIS rule.

A Horrific Killing

The terrible fate of Mr. Foley, a freelance reporter who knew well the dangers of Middle Eastern conflicts, was horrifying also in its familiarity. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terror group that evolved into ISIS, had been known before he was killed as “Sheikh of the Slaughterers” for the many foreign captives he decapitated.

Yet starting with the epidemic of kidnappings in Latin America in the 1970s, the primary goal of political kidnappings had been to raise money for rebel organizations. ISIS had initially demanded money in exchange for Mr. Foley, and only after none was paid did it seize on the American air raids to kill him. That is bound to revive the debate over whether paying ransom to terrorists, as many European governments are known to do, only ensures more political kidnappings.

For the United States, the question was what to do next. When President Obama ordered airstrikes against ISIS earlier this month, the administration took pains to underscore that the action was limited, and that the United States was not being drawn back into Iraq.

The airstrikes apparently did help Kurdish and Iraqi Army forces to push back ISIS, retake the vitally important Mosul Dam and free Iraqi Yazidis who had been stranded on a mountain top.

The Obama administration is now also hoping that the imminent departure of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will lead to a more inclusive Iraqi government better capable of pushing ISIS back.

Racial Clashes in Ferguson

In Ferguson, and across the United States, it was time to take stock of what had happened in the days of rage. What really took place between the 18-year-old black man Michael Brown and the white police officer who shot him dead, Darren Wilson, is still not clear. But the enormous gap between black and white perceptions of the event reflected the degree to which race relations in the United States remain troubled.

A nationwide poll by The New York Times/CBS News found that most whites were not prepared to pass judgment on whether the shooting was justified, while most blacks were adamant that it was not. Thirty-eight percent of black respondents thought protesters did not go too far, compared to only 15 percent of whites.

Such attitudes went to the heart of the clashes in Ferguson — the belief among black Americans that the police are far more ruthless against them than against whites, and the denial of whites that this is so.

Such perceptions, as Ms. Pillay noted, build up over years — in this case over generations. The key is not to assume that a cease-fire in the streets means the conflict has been resolved.

Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.